Posts from — October 2007

Well, how did you do? Inquiring minds want to know!

Sure, the scores are on the web and they may have already been uploaded to Logbook of The World and your favorite QSL provider.

But, it’s not the scores.

How did YOU do?

Meet your goals? Tested everything out before the contest? Struggled through poor operating conditions? Surprised at the ten meter openings with ZERO sunspots? What would you have done better?

It’s After Action Review time! I’d love to see some discussion around what worked well for you, what could have been better, and whether or not you tracked to your goals for the contest.

Scot, K9JY

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The first step in working with Global QSL is creating an account for your callsigns, QSL Bureau, and/or your QSL Manager. This is pretty straightforward:

1. Provide the callsigns you want to have Global QSL send out cards.

In my case, I’ve held the callsigns of KA9QVD, NB9C, NB200C, K9JY, VP9/K9JY, and TI5/K9JY. However, I only have K9JY and VP9/K9JY registered with Global QSL. The reasons? Almost all of my NB9C, NB200C, and KA9QVD QSL requests have been accounted for. And I had few TI5 contacts in using my callsign because we used TI5N for most of the operation. The volume is left in the two callsigns.

2. Identify your incoming QSL bureau and how you want cards handled that Global QSL also has on their accounts for you.

For example, if EI7XX wants to send me a bureau card and the card is printed and sent by Global QSL, do I want it sent to my K9 bureau or direct? I answered that the cards should be sent to the K9 bureau like any other bureau card.

As an update, since I uploaded by cards about ten days ago, 81% are already on their way to the correct bureau with the rest in queue for the next printing.

Scot, K9JY

Photo Credit: QSL Cards by LU6FPI on Flickr

Last week, I said that I’d update you all on my experience with Global QSL during the week. Well, I missed last week due to commitments balanced with time; I’m ending up doing it this week.

What I am going to focus on over the next series of posts is how Global QSL works and why it specifically works for me. Your results may vary, of course, depending upon your needs, time, and finances. But, if you are a contester and gets lots of QSL cards (what contester doesn’t?), then this series will be of interest to you.

This article will look at the benefits to the contester from both the company point of view as well as my contesting viewpoint.

In a nutshell, with a little technology and a few dollars, Global QSL will fully manage the printing and distribution of your bureau (and other) QSL cards. This is no small thing to do.

The way Global QSL works

There is essentially a three step process for handling your bureau QSL cards:

1. Subscribe to the service. You’ve done this on other web sites — sign up with your user name and password.
2. Design your personal QSL card. You can do this with the supplied free program from Global QSL using your images — two sided color cards — or have Global QSL design your card for you. Also at no charge.
3. Upload your ADIF file of calls from your log or enter your QSO’s manually (for example, for SWL cards).

These three steps are what I did to get my 500 or so cards uploaded to the site.

The benefits

There are several benefits to the contester for this type of service:

• You don’t write QSL Cards or print labels. Because you upload an ADIF file to Global QSL, they will print the QSO information on the card for you.
• You don’t sort your out-going cards. They do that as part of the printing process.
• You don’t pay at one QSO per card rate; the print multiple contacts (up to five) on one card.
• You save a lot of time managing QSL cards. I did my 500 cards by entering them into my log, producing the ADIF file and uploading them to Global QSL in about five hours.
• They can send you cards to use for direct QSL’s. Might as well get that great picture QSL card for direct cards as well.
• They send cards to each bureau in the world for you. They know the bureaus and they send to them in bulk — sometimes every day because of their volume.

The features

Global QSL has some features as well that help support the service:

• Up to ten call signs with unique graphic and picture shots for each callsign.
• Change the graphic design by yourself at any time.
• Your cards are printed in full color on both sides
• Reporting on cards.

The bottom line

I don’t know about you, but I’ve had a lot of resistance to sending out bureau cards. They come in bunches, they need to be sorted out, and I tend to put them in a pile over there to get to later. It turns out, much later.

This was the first logical service I have found that makes it easy to send cards.

I much prefer Logbook of The World, of course. But the paper QSL card isn’t going away any time soon and this service gets me to honoring the QSO by confirming it much easier than anything I’ve done in the past.

Next up: working the process. Including screen shots.

Scot, K9JY

I have long been remiss in not reporting on N0HR’s tower progress. I’ve been watching this fairly long process (for those who have not put up a tower, it takes much longer than you think) with great fascination. And, to be honest, a great amount of envy.

But, great pictures of the process and a ton of information about all of the other stuff that goes into putting up a tower and antennas.

Here are the links and a quick summary of the posts:

• A beautiful day to put up a tower. The end result of all the work — but before antennas go up.
• The nuts and bolts of building a ham radio tower. Yes, there really are lots of nuts and bolts in putting up a tower.
• Tower foundation is in place! All the details in getting the foundation ready to accept cement.
• Ham radio tower progress. Progress on the foundation.

And this doesn’t represent the posts on lightning protection, grounding, selecting coax and all the other details about what is needed for a great tower installation.

And now you know why N0HR’s blog title is “Ham Radio — A contact sport.” Take a visit for some great information.

Scot, K9JY

The CQ WW SSB contest is coming up pretty quick. After the contest, watch the reflectors you belong to carefully. How many people will wail and knash their teeth on the reflector about equipment not working, antennas not turning, and software not doing the job?

Now, there is some legitimate breakage during the contest. But you see those posts as “20-hours into the contest, my amplifier blew up and I had to continue on barefoot…” type of comments.

I’m not writing about those types of issues. I’m writing about those contesters who tell us they started the contest and nothing worked right. The antennas had high SWR, the radio wouldn’t connect with the software program, or the rotors wouldn’t work.

The cure for common failure is this: do a dry run of your station before the contest starts.

Here are the critical components to test:

• Radio, amplifier, and antenna transmit with low SWR
• Antenna rotors turn
• Contesting software is set up for the contest at hand
• Contesting software networks with other computers
• Software drives the antenna rotors if so configured
• Software and radio works to transmit your messages
• Your sound card works to receive signals
• You work five imaginary stations in your contest program — check to ensure it is scoring the contest correctly.
• On each antenna, preferably on each band

You’ll be glad you tested at least a week before the contest — it gives you time to research, fix, and air ship any parts before the big one.

Otherwise you can go crazy watching everything break and enjoy the pressure of trying to fix 20-things one hour before the contest.

Hey — you get to choose!

Scot, K9JY